"Playing out in an elite academic world of Renaissance tarot cards, this modern Gothic novel is a gloriously compulsive, captivating delight."
Power, seduction, obsession, manipulation, and the role we assign to fate, Katy Hays’ The Cloisters is a divinely suspenseful novel, thronging with sultry atmosphere, otherworldly Renaissance magic, and real-world ambition.
Still grieving her father, Ann moves from her small-town home to New York City to take up an internship at the Met. On arrival, fate steps in (perhaps…) and sees her assigned to a different curator in a different part of the Met. Namely, The Cloisters, a Gothic maze of a museum known for its medieval and Renaissance artefacts.
Patrick, the curator of The Cloisters and his outrageously wealthy young assistant have a special interest in arcane history, with Patrick obsessed with rare Tarot cards. When Ann is drawn into this obsession and makes her own discoveries, she becomes entangled in a web of power-play, and decides she needs to take control of her own fate.
Menacing and exquisitely mapped The Cloisters explores the impulse for self-preservation, and for safeguarding “our own best interests, our own goals and dreams.” Perhaps paradoxically, when a tarot reading suggests Ann should follow her own intuition, she defies fate by doing exactly that — she carves out her own destiny, creates her own opportunities, forges her own future. What a satisfyingly thrilling, chilling, seductive story.
Primary Genre | Historical Fiction |
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